Black Pharaoh said:
the starship rules in d20 future are all screwed up. The size issues are just the tip of the iceberg.
The one that really bugs me is the 500 foot square. I don't think whoever wrote those rules really understands how big space is.
Most starships weapons are fairly "short range" (if you can really call a 3,000-ft. range increment
short), and it fits with the sizes of starships. If you used a 5,000-ft. square instead of a 500-foot one, think of how many starfighters could be occupying one square! Then, the rules for collisions would make them far too common for such a wide area.
I don't like everything about d20 Future's starship rules (hell, no one on this board does, AFAIK), but if you get into sizes beyond Colossal, what do you do about size penalties to Defense and attack rolls? The 2nd Death Star had a 60-km radius. That's approximately 196850.3937 feet, or 3075.7874016 times the 64-foot requirement for Colossal creatures. Under the normal system for increasing size categories, that would be a Colossal XII. If you made the size penalty to Defense and attack rolls follow the standard progression as well, it would have a -32,768 penalty to Defense as well as having the same penalty to all its attack rolls. That does explain why its turbolaser batteries never managed to hit any Rebel fighters except on a natural 20, but anyway...
Obviously, the rules would be ridiculous at that VERY FAR end of the spectrum. Anything beyond +8/-8 size modifier is normally counterintuitive, really. Starships are constantly in motion in starship combat, just like characters in normal person-to-SpaceMonkaaay(tm) encounters. Even if it is a massive behemoth, a -8 to AC is effectively granting a Huge attacker a +30% chance to hit at all times. In a d20 System game, that's a very good bonus.
Myself, I use an HR variant of the Star Wars ship sizes–it follows the standard increment of doubling each time (64 ft., 128 ft., 256 ft., etc), but on the starship scale Medium-sized creatures are Fine, and Small or smaller are "Fine+" (+16 attacks/AC). This puts a Large mecha at Diminutive on the starship scale, presently "Huge" starships as Tiny, presently "Gargantuan" as Small, and other ships are reassigned based on just how much bigger they are, up to Colossal at 1,024+ feet in length. Anything bigger than that isn't really that much harder to hit than a 1,024-2,047-foot metal chunk.
